Stardate: 58509.4

The small round table in the detention area of Holodeck Four had been replaced with an exact replica of the table in the observation lounge off the bridge, with one chair at each head of the table and four on each side.

Lore paced near T'Mera, "Maybe I can be seated near the people I haven't previously tried to kill."

T'Mera's left eyebrow rose with amusement, "Should I be looking up the etiquette for seating arrangements with killer androids?" She studied Lore for a moment, "Do you want to be wearing clothes for this, or would you rather attend the meeting in your underwear?"

"It's not as if I get cold." Lore shrugged at the holographer, "You're going to be exposing my programming, and my head's already open, so underwear should be fine." He pointed to the variety of monitors attached to the open ports in his cranial unit.

"I guess we'll wait to see where everyone sits." T'Mera surveyed the table, then waved her left hand, creating a backdrop of windows looking out into the stars.

"Maybe I'll sit next to you." Lore sidled up to T'Mera with a broad smirk on his lips.

T'Mera returned the smirk, "If you wish. It would probably put everyone at ease to have you sitting next to the one person who can take you down. I'm engineered to be able to stop Data if he's on a rampage."

The smirk vanished immediately from Lore's face, "I can't picture my timid brother on a rampage."

"Ohhh, he's been known to do so, on rare occasion." T'Mera rubbed her chin as she stared at the curved table. "Ah. I have it. You can sit at the head of the table that's opposite the Captain, with Data and I on either side of you." She gestured with her left hand and glasses of water appeared at each place at the table. "Do you think you'll be having any physical outbursts? I can move the punching bag near you."

"I do have some self control, thank you." Lore rolled his eyes and started to pace around the table.

T'Mera walked past Lore to the wall, reached into her mouth, pulled out a small wad of gum and dropped it into the recycler unit. "Is it acceptable to you if, when I'm reporting on my findings, I refer to you in the third person?"

"It's fine." Lore grumbled as he continued to circle around the meeting area.

The doors opened, and Commander Data entered the meeting area. "Good evening, t'hy'la. Good evening, Lore." He stopped as he noticed the table. "An excellent reproduction of the observation lounge." He resumed walking, until he reached T'Mera and drew her into an embrace and kiss. "My mental pathways are still unaccustomed to the absence of your sensory input patterns."

T'Mera returned the hug, not replying with words, but by extending the duration and intensity of the kiss.

Lore watched the couple with slight amusement, "In other words, you miss her, Data."

"Is that not what I said?" Data responded to his brother as he and T'Mera concluded their greeting. "I simply said it sagaciously."

"Grandiloquent verbosity is more like it." Lore snorted, shaking his head. The sound of the doors opening drew his attention away from the amorous couple. "Ah. Hello, La Forge. Nice eyes. You grew facial hair, as well."

Geordi grimaced as he entered the holodeck, "Hello, Lore. It's been a while."

Lore moved to stand behind the table, near the holographic windows, "Eleven years, although I didn't experience the time passage. I never do, when I'm deactivated. It's quite disconcerting."

"Greetings, Geordi." Data released T'Mera, "I am glad you are here. Before the meeting begins, I wanted you to see the connections that were repaired in Lore's links." He placed a hand on Lore's shoulder, "It would be best if you are seated."

Lore settled into the chair at the foot of the table.

Geordi approached with caution, "Shouldn't Lore be immobilized for the meeting?"

T'Mera walked to the chair on Lore's left side, "Data and I will be seated on each side of him. Even if Lore somehow moves faster than us, he isn't going to be faster than the photonics." She leaned down to look into Lore's face, "You'll behave, right?"

Lore hissed in reply, through gritted teeth, "Yes. I don't intend to do anything but listen and talk."

Geordi joined Data directly behind Lore, then whistled through his teeth, "Whoa. Who did this?"

"A Mister Rylan at the Daystrom Institute." Lore slouched in his seat. "Why is he even there, if this is the caliber of his work?"

T'Mera sat in the chair to place her eyes level to Lore's, "He's an excellent lecturer, believe it or not. He knows what he's doing and describes it well. It's just that something goes awry when he physically works on cybernetic equipment. It's like his hands don't get the information from his brain."

"That's not reassuring." Lore frowned at the holographer.

T'Mera reached out her right hand to place over Lore's, "His mistake is what activated you prematurely. As far as I can figure, by crossing those connections, it bypassed the switch in your back. It also had another unexpected result, which I'll get into during the meeting."

Lore blinked in surprise and stared at the hand on top of his own.

Geordi peered at the back of Lore's head, "Well, we can repair this, once T'Mera gives us the green light. I hesitate to do it now, since I'm not sure how he's running."

T'Mera patted Lore's hand then withdrew her own hand. "Neural nets will sometimes use alternate pathways when they need to. I'll elaborate more, but right now, Lore is actually functioning via previously unused backup systems and pathways, and making use of some subroutines he hadn't been able to until now."

The holodeck doors opened, letting the rest of the Senior staff inside. Within minutes, everyone was seated at the curved table. Captain Picard gazed down the table at everyone. To his left, Counselor Veluna, Doctor Crusher, Geordi and Data took their seats, while Commander Worf and Security Chief Hagan sat in the two chairs to his right, near the simulated windows.

Captain Picard fixed his eyes on T'Mera, "Now that we're all assembled, let's have the report, Doctor Chipman."

"Thank you, Captain." T'Mera leaned forward, placing her right hand on the lighted surface of the table. "Just to forewarn everyone, my findings include some pretty horrifying revelations, so I want to begin by talking about Doctor Noonian Soong. He was known as Earth's foremost robotics scientist, who then vanished after early experiments with positronic brains. He eventually travelled under an assumed name somewhere around 2326 to Omicron Theta to join the colony of scientists who were unable to work in reputable or ethical institutions." She reached for her glass of water and took a quick sip.

"I want everyone here to stop thinking of Doctor Soong as Geppetto, if you had previously done so. He wasn't. He was Victor Frankenstein, if anything. He was a deeply selfish and narcissistic individual who didn't respect the sentience of his own creations, and whose actions in some cases have been irresponsible, negligent and criminal. You'll understand as I work my way through what went wrong with Lore's creation and upbringing." T'Mera continued in her report.

"I'll begin with the problems in a few physical components." T'Mera gestured with her left hand and a small, floating camera lowered itself to be level with the back of Lore's head. A display of the open connections in the back of the android's head appeared over the middle of the table, "Lore was accidentally reactivated when these two lines were crossed." A pointer appeared in the holographic display, indicating the areas. "Not only did this have the unexpected effect of waking Lore, but it skipped some parts of his startup sequence and caused the self-correcting mechanism to run long enough to reroute his subroutines and to transfer positronic matrix functions to alternative pathways. Then, it hit the original error and shut itself down, but Lore remained activated, and still using the alternate pathways, not his usual pathways." She looked around the table, "Is everyone still with me?"

Commander Worf stared at Lore for a moment, then replied to T'Mera, "His activation this time was abnormal."

Chief Hagan smiled faintly, "What he said. While I don't understand the specifics, I get the gist of it."

Captain Picard nodded to the holographer, "Please continue."

T'Mera continued the report, "The rerouting is an extremely important issue, in this case. According to the decompiler logs, Lore's system hadn't been running either the self-correcting mechanism or the the ethics and moral subroutines prior to his current activation. Due to Mister Rylan's technical errors, a small part of the morals subroutine is currently running in Lore's system, with the functional part of the code working in the alternative pathway. Here's where it gets crazy…"

Lore watched the image of his connections with horror, then turned his attention back to T'Mera's face.

"I think I found the initial problems that caused Lore to be "evil", so to speak." T'Mera changed the display to that of a text readout of complicated code. "His moral and ethics base programming is untouched and it's definitely Soong's source code. It's very close to what B-4 had, but Soong altered it slightly. That alteration had a fatal error in it. Lore should have gone right into cascade failure after his first activation."

Doctor Crusher's expression softened from the angry glares she had been aiming at Lore, to one of curiosity. "Why didn't he?"

"Because Lore's self-correction program also has a fatal error in it. By itself, that should have cascaded him." T'Mera used the pointer to indicate the lines of faulty code. "Together, however, the two fatal errors cancelled each other out by causing an early interrupt of both, and then Lore's basic heuristic programming did a full bypass of the ethics subroutines and self-correction mechanism. Lore continued to function, but was amoral and without the mechanism to correct his errors. You can even see it in the neural net scan. For comparison purposes, this is Data's neural net." The display changed to a colorful 3D image of a neural net.

With another gesture of T'Mera's left hand, a second neural net image appeared next to the first. "This one is Lore's. Notice that Lore has less connectivity between the subcortical relays and the ventromedial prefrontal relays. What should be his amygdala is not functioning as it ought to." She moved the pointers to highlight the pertinent areas.

Captain Picard studied the images, "Is that significant?"

Veluna spoke in her usual dulcet tone, "That's extremely significant, Captain. Criminal psychopathy is associated with decreased connectivity between the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. With low connectivity, the processing of negative stimuli from the amygdala doesn't translate into negative emotions. They won't feel nervous or embarrassed when they're caught doing something bad. They don't feel sad when other people suffer. Though they feel physical pain, they are not themselves in a position to suffer from emotional hurts."

Doctor Crusher added, "The ventral medial prefrontal cortex also plays a role in the inhibition of emotional responses, and in the process of decision making." Her blue eyes focused on Lore at the foot of the table, "Psychopaths have difficulties following rules based on moral sensibility, despite fully understanding the rules."

"So, we begin with an android whose moral subroutines and amygdala aren't working, and who can't inhibit his emotions, and whose decision-making is hindered. It gets even worse as we go on." T'Mera bit her lower lip and changed to a different display.

Data winced and glanced to his left to watch his brother, "There is more?"

"I'm afraid so, Data." T'Mera brought up a text readout, "B-4 was thankfully spared this part of creation. Lore and Data were not. Soong experimented with using synaptic scans, and put the scans of over four hundred colonists into his androids. At this point, I need to state that using multiple synaptic scans to create an amalgam personality in an artificial intelligence is a terrible idea, even if you have four hundred wonderful people's scans. What Soong had access to was the synaptic scans of four hundred scientists, most of whom were known to be unethical, antisocial, self-absorbed and capable of petty actions towards their colleagues in the service of their own ambitions."

Veluna grimaced, gazing at the androids at the foot of the table, "The most brilliant minds can often be the most unstable."

T'Mera nodded to the counselor, "And what happens is that when you feed all that information into an artificial neural net, the neural net will immediately begin to search for the commonalities and patterns and then incorporate them. Since Lore was running with emotions and no morality, he must have focused on the emotional matches of the colonists. The arrogance, ambition, envy, and anger all became part of Lore."

T'Mera paused for a quick sip of water, "So, now you take an android whose moral and ethical subroutines and corrective mechanisms are broken and you've given him the strongest personality traits of four hundred brilliant assholes…" She added a soft aside, "... pardon the language…" then continued in her report, "Now it gets even worse. Lore was then activated and set loose among the colony, as if he were finished and functioning perfectly. He was never properly trained or socialized, aside from Doctor Soong telling Lore that he was superior to humans."

Lore returned Data's glance, then leaned back in the chair to watch the displays in misery.

"Given what Lore's told me, so far, he was rejected and reviled by most of the colonists." T'Mera tilted her head to look past the holographic display, "While I can repair the broken subroutines and components, Counselor Veluna will have to help Lore to heal from the psychological damage inflicted on him during his formative months."

Geordi straightened in his seat, "But if Data has the same synaptic scans, why isn't Data unstable?"

T'Mera gazed across the table to the Chief Engineer, "Doctor Soong's answer to Lore's instability was to remove Data's ability to feel his emotions, so Data's neural net focused on the scientific bits… the curiosity and the desire to learn and improve. It's possible that Data might have been arrogant, as well. Data's self-correcting mechanism didn't contain the fatal error, and he overwrote his own moral and ethical subroutines based on Starfleet and the Federation. The final saving grace for Data was that his own memories of his time on the colony were completely wiped and he was raised by Starfleet. If Soong hadn't done that, Data would carry the emotional baggage from his time on the colony. The blank slate allowed him to have a couple of decades of rewriting his own programming and slowly building his own personality with far better role models than Lore had." She changed the display once more, "Back to Lore and Doctor Soong, though. It gets worse."

Captain Picard watched the display, "What are we seeing now?"

"The so-called emotion chip's source code." T'Mera answered, moving the pointer to a line, "Data's recount of installing the emotion chip always bothered me. Not just that Soong had so little respect for his own creations and hijacked them to come to his world, but the purpose of the emotion chip. He'd never bothered to check Data's programming or progress. Yet he was able to make this chip that would supposedly work in Data?" She glanced sidelong at Lore, "I think I'll put the punching bag next to you, for this revelation." The bag appeared in the space between Lore and Data.

Lore folded his arms across his chest and leaned back in his seat, "Just because I'm a monster doesn't mean I'll go into an uncontrollable rage."

"It's just in case." T'Mera gave Lore a small smile, then highlighted a couple of lines in the display, "Much of the code on the chip is nothing more than call functions that amplify the generated emotions of the positronic matrix. These two lines, however, are calls for the memories from the chip, which are under the directory named Foundation. Once it's activated, the chip creates an imperative which overrides all other priorities." She hesitated as she caught Data's expression of dismay, "The chip is meant to force the android it's slotted in to create a race of artificial lifeforms and to lead them."

With the exception of T'Mera, all eyes were on Lore, who frowned and remained calmly seated.

Data stood abruptly, knocking his chair backwards with a loud clatter to the floor. "What?!" He swung his left fist at the nearby punching bag, "Dammit!"

Lore jumped a bit in his chair, startled by his brother's sudden outburst.

"Commander?" Captain Picard spoke to his second officer in the familiar, authoritative tone.

"Apologies, sir." Data righted his chair and returned to his seated position.

T'Mera waited for Data to get settled down, then elaborated, "I'm thinking that Soong kept tabs on Data and found out that he'd made Lal. That was why he chose that particular time to hijack Data to his lair on Terlina III. Calling it an emotion chip was most likely a carrot he knew Data wouldn't refuse. Clever little Trojan."

Lore began to laugh quietly, "But I stole the chip, because I'm an asshole and Often Wrong couldn't tell us apart. Since I couldn't make androids, I did the closest thing I could. I tried to turn the disconnected Borg into fully artificial lifeforms."

T'Mera bit her lip, "And the emotional amplification of the chip made you even more unstable than before. I'm sorry, Lore."

"You have nothing to be sorry for, T'Mera." Lore averted his eyes and stared at the table's surface. "Even if everyone here decides to put me to death, it was satisfying to find out what happened. Thank you for trying to help me."

"Is all this supposed to excuse what Lore's done?" Doctor Crusher sighed, then took a drink from her glass.

T'Mera shook her head, "Explain, not excuse, Doctor, although I can understand the confusion. Both words start with an 'E'. I realize I seem like I'm being condescending, but trust me, I'm not. I'm also informationally armed, so beware of any judgements on Lore, right now. While Lore's actions with the Borg are more like mind control, his actions prior to the emotion chip are his own." She met the gaze of each person at the table, "My current purpose has been to find the underlying causes to Lore's malfunctions and I've done so. Lore didn't start out with his 'evil' toggle set to ON. The errors in his programming and components can be fixed. As for the psychological damage that's been done, it would be up to Lore and Veluna. Those are my findings."

Geordi took a sip from his glass of water, "Wait. If the emotion chip was supposed to force Data to go off and create a race of androids, why didn't he do that after we put the emotion chip in him?"

Lore glanced warily at Data, then answered Geordi's question, "In a fit of sibling rivalry, I removed the memories from the chip and kept them for myself."

"The chip requires the memories for the imperative to be run." T'Mera appended, "Without the Foundation directory, the emotion chip was simply an emotion amplifier."

Data stared intently into Lore's eyes, "Ironic. Your pernicious actions saved me from our father's imperative."

Lore stared back at his brother with equal intensity. "Do me a favor. Spend your next off-shift with T'Mera." He turned to speak to Chief Hagan, "You can assign that Ensign Murphy to me, so T'Mera can have a break?"

Hagan blinked at Lore's request, then nodded, "Of course. I can have them on the next alpha shift here."

Captain Picard pushed his chair away from the table, "Thank you for the report, Doctor Chipman. I think it might be best for us to absorb the information before any decisions are made. Enjoy the rest of the evening, everyone." He gave Counselor Veluna and Chief Hagan pointed looks, then stood up and walked out of the holodeck.

T'Mera gestured, returning the punching bag to its previous position, then walked around the table to Data's side. "I'll see you at alpha shift, then?"

Lore rose from his chair and shuffled his feet as he headed to the punching bag.

Data pulled T'Mera into an embrace, then kissed her. "Yes. I will go to our quarters at alpha shift." He released her, then walked to the exit and out into the corridor.

Everyone except Doctor Crusher followed Captain Picard out of the holodeck. Beverly Crusher walked across the floor to stand a couple of meters away from Lore.

Lore glanced at Doctor Crusher, "Your hair looks nice. It's different from the last time I saw you."

"You mean when you threatened to kill Wesley and then you set me on fire?" Doctor Crusher replied coldly.

Lore leaned against the bag, and the left side of his mouth quirked upwards, "That would be then, yes. Is there something I can do for you?"

"No." Doctor Crusher answered as she studied his face, "I'm just trying to figure out what kind of trick you're playing."

"Do me a favor." Lore turned so that his back was pushing against the punching bag, "If you figure out the trick, tell me what it is, because I don't have the foggiest idea."

Doctor Crusher let out a sigh, then spun on her heels and left the holodeck.

Once the doctor was gone, Lore turned his attention to T'Mera. He strolled to the chaise lounge, sat down on the cushion and watched the holographer for a moment. "Data's keeping something from me. I could see it in his eyes."

T'Mera stopped her work and glanced to her left at Lore. "Yes. There's a promise we made to someone that we might have to break, in order to tell you."

Lore leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees, "Let me guess. It's not something that will make me happy."

T'Mera shook her head, "No. Definitely not." She studied the android's face for a moment, "I do have to say you comported yourself well during the meeting."

"I had the right motivation." Lore smirked as he stood up and turned to head to the punching bag, "No way in hell was I going to let that Klingon see me cry."